Conceptually, a customer loyalty programme is pretty straightforward to comprehend. At its simplest level, a customer earns rewards from repeated business in the form of points, discounts or free items and the businesses increase sales. It’s a basic but very powerful strategy.

Your customers are other businesses. They have their own business to run. They're not likely to be looking for all the bells and whistles in your loyalty programme but are likely to be looking to see if you have one. They don't want to evaluate lots of actions that you may reward.

In the past B2B marketers have mostly viewed B2C loyalty and reward programmes as irrelevant, determining instead that businesses won’t respond - and in any case customer retention is the responsibility of those in sales, service and support.